Thursday, 04 July 2013

Congratulations to Esther Saxey for this fantastic post, which has won her First Prize in the This Itch of Writing 500th Postiversary Competition. Esther wins a free Quick read of 5,000 words, synopsis and covering letter, from Writer's
Workshop.

What I love about Esther's piece is how she's thinking about craft, in the sense that I use the term: the business of what's going at the interface between imagination and technique. It's craft that makes what you want to say into something the reader can and will and will want to read. And Esther made me laugh, which I'm always grateful for, and you can always get me with a reference to psychic distance... Enjoy!

SEEMING AND THINKING

On my last long project, Ctrl+F showed me that seems
cropped up every 600 words. Swarms of seems created moments of ludicrous
uncertainty: 'It seemed to be a piece of white paper' - what
was it really? A flat seagull? (In Spencer’s Fairy Queen seems
means someone's in disguise or lying - Sober he seemde - a likely
story.) I followed Hamlet's advice (‘Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not
'seems.') and chopped 4/5ths (some replaced by looked, felt, sounded, appeared).

Why so many? The seems were,
appropriately enough, an attempt at stitching. They were suturing a bit of
information to the character observing it. So a building 'seemed to loom' over
the character beneath it. The 'seem' was my shoddy attempt at emphasizing the
character's perspective. (This would be better done by saying 'Jane
thought: Blimey, it looms a lot, doesn't it?' Or better yet, rewriting the
whole paragraph so that what is perceived is so textured and idiosyncratic it
can't be anyone except Jane perceiving.) In terms of psychic
distance, it was a half-hearted ineffectual crash zoom.

I enjoyed changing to a first person narrator
for my current project – at least I'd stop seeming. However, now I can’t
stop thinking.

My first person narrator can say: ‘Tim made a
sandwich using the wrong cheese. What an idiot!’.

So why do I sometimes add ‘…I thought’?

Is it about tense? Does ‘I thought’ show the
narrator’s opinion in the moment itself, as opposed to their thoughts when
‘retelling’ the story (as the past tense implies)? (To take it to an extreme:
‘What an idiot, I thought; but three weeks later, when he died of e-coli, I
regretted my harshness.’)

That sense of a slight distance also applies to
a distance within the narrator herself. My narrator often isn't reacting
coherently, and is sometimes drunk. ‘I thought: I should put the knife down,
now’ implies, I hope, that she's watching herself thinking it. It’s all a bit
stilted and woozy. Or maybe she’s shocked by her thought - she's only just
noticed Tim is an idiot. ‘I thought’ attempts to mark the distance between my
character and her own thoughts.

And it's about psychic distance, again. I’d
become used, in the third person, to zooming in and out of character’s
point-of-views (seem being a clumsy tool to attempt that). When I
switched to narrating from inside one character’s head, I needed new ways to
draw back from her or squidging up close. My initial tools are crude: physical
perceptions and swearing get me closer. Framing the character’s instinctive
responses with a more formal 'I thought' looked like a way of holding her at arm’s
length. It's not a great tool, though. It works better as a note of intent to
myself. Now I know what I'm attempting, as with seems, I'll find
replacements.

Comments

Congratulations to Esther Saxey for this fantastic post, which has won her First Prize in the This Itch of Writing 500th Postiversary Competition. Esther wins a free Quick read of 5,000 words, synopsis and covering letter, from Writer's
Workshop.

What I love about Esther's piece is how she's thinking about craft, in the sense that I use the term: the business of what's going at the interface between imagination and technique. It's craft that makes what you want to say into something the reader can and will and will want to read. And Esther made me laugh, which I'm always grateful for, and you can always get me with a reference to psychic distance... Enjoy!

SEEMING AND THINKING

On my last long project, Ctrl+F showed me that seems
cropped up every 600 words. Swarms of seems created moments of ludicrous
uncertainty: 'It seemed to be a piece of white paper' - what
was it really? A flat seagull? (In Spencer’s Fairy Queen seems
means someone's in disguise or lying - Sober he seemde - a likely
story.) I followed Hamlet's advice (‘Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not
'seems.') and chopped 4/5ths (some replaced by looked, felt, sounded, appeared).

Why so many? The seems were,
appropriately enough, an attempt at stitching. They were suturing a bit of
information to the character observing it. So a building 'seemed to loom' over
the character beneath it. The 'seem' was my shoddy attempt at emphasizing the
character's perspective. (This would be better done by saying 'Jane
thought: Blimey, it looms a lot, doesn't it?' Or better yet, rewriting the
whole paragraph so that what is perceived is so textured and idiosyncratic it
can't be anyone except Jane perceiving.) In terms of psychic
distance, it was a half-hearted ineffectual crash zoom.

I enjoyed changing to a first person narrator
for my current project – at least I'd stop seeming. However, now I can’t
stop thinking.

My first person narrator can say: ‘Tim made a
sandwich using the wrong cheese. What an idiot!’.

So why do I sometimes add ‘…I thought’?

Is it about tense? Does ‘I thought’ show the
narrator’s opinion in the moment itself, as opposed to their thoughts when
‘retelling’ the story (as the past tense implies)? (To take it to an extreme:
‘What an idiot, I thought; but three weeks later, when he died of e-coli, I
regretted my harshness.’)

That sense of a slight distance also applies to
a distance within the narrator herself. My narrator often isn't reacting
coherently, and is sometimes drunk. ‘I thought: I should put the knife down,
now’ implies, I hope, that she's watching herself thinking it. It’s all a bit
stilted and woozy. Or maybe she’s shocked by her thought - she's only just
noticed Tim is an idiot. ‘I thought’ attempts to mark the distance between my
character and her own thoughts.

And it's about psychic distance, again. I’d
become used, in the third person, to zooming in and out of character’s
point-of-views (seem being a clumsy tool to attempt that). When I
switched to narrating from inside one character’s head, I needed new ways to
draw back from her or squidging up close. My initial tools are crude: physical
perceptions and swearing get me closer. Framing the character’s instinctive
responses with a more formal 'I thought' looked like a way of holding her at arm’s
length. It's not a great tool, though. It works better as a note of intent to
myself. Now I know what I'm attempting, as with seems, I'll find
replacements.